Silicon Insider: The End of the Modern Age
May 7, 2002 -- Three experiences on a single day recently left me wondering if this is the end of civilization … or its renewal.
The first was a daily Web site surf that brought me to an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education by the eminent historian John Lukacs, titled "It's the End of the Modern Age."
The gist is that "Western" civilization, that way of organizing society around individualism, market capitalism, democracy and the Scientific Method, which began in southern Europe, then spread to England, then the United States and then the world, is now in irremediable decline.
The liberal humanism Zeitgeist, born in the Renaissance, codified by the Declaration of Independence, and that doubled human lifespans and put a man on the moon, is now at the end of its cycle.
I read the essay with more than a little skepticism. For one thing, every generation is convinced that it has been chosen, among all the others, for a unique fate. People have been talking about the end of civilization for a long time, and usually it's aging historians rationalizing their own approaching demises.
Besides, after getting a close-up look at the Muslim "street" on TV the last few months — and especially after the triumph of American technology in Afghanistan and the burst of patriotism here at home — it is hard to imagine a viable replacement for Bacon, Locke and Edison.
A Second-Rate Society After All?
Yet I found myself unable to deny Lukacs' core message. As a matter of fact, I have felt like I was born into a culture in decline — a world of self-referential, mannerist and second-rate literature, architecture, music and art, a collapse of civic duty, moral relativism, degeneracy, rampant nihilism and a celebration of the ugly and debased.
I remember my late father, the most forward-looking man I've ever known, saying to me not long before he died, "Don't let 'em kid you, Mike. It really was better 50 years ago."
Pretty depressing stuff indeed. And nicely tuned to the general malaise we've all been feeling out here in Silicon Valley ever since the stock market crash.
When people you know — folks who were the most optimistic technologists and entrepreneurs just two years ago — are now talking about leaving tech forever and going into selling real estate, it's not hard to believe the whole world is going to hell.
That morning, I felt like one of those overcivilized Romans sitting in his villa reading Pindar and weeping over a perfect rose petal while the Visigoths are outside burning the fields and murdering the staff.
Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez
But then, noon found me at the offices of Applied Materials Corp., talking with Tom Hayes, the managing director of global corporate affairs. Three months ago, like most people in the chip equipment business, he was seriously depressed. Now, he had a big grin on his face. "It's amazing," he said, "the numbers aren't just turning around, they're spiking."
I threw a fist in the air as I crossed the parking lot. Yesss! The Valley's recession is over! If a bellwether like Applied is showing good numbers, the rest of the electronics industry will follow. That means new start-ups, venture capital money flowing like wine, cool new products and everybody getting rich again. I could feel the Valley beginning to stir from its long, fitful sleep.
The blood was beginning to pump again. How can civilization be coming to an end? As long as we have Moore's Law, plucky entrepreneurs and the United States of America we can keep this five-century dream going for another half-millennium.
I wanted to roll down my truck window and yell, "Laissez les bon temps roulez, you sad bastards!"
Frontier Soap Opera
I felt great right up until 5:30 p.m., when I strained my elbow throwing pop-ups to my 11-year-old. After dinner, elbow throbbing, my head buzzing with a double dose of Advil, I felt old and creaky again. On the news, pedophile priests were being handcuffed, Britney Spears was smoking cigarettes, and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was on fire.
I decided Lukacs was right after all. We live in a world that has abandoned God (or vice versa), embraces polymorphous perversity, is bizarrely enamored with both death and perpetual adolescence, and believes all truths are situational. To hell with it all. Bring on the Anti-Christ and let's get this charade over with.
About nine, after the drugs finally kicked in, I started feeling better. The screaming elbow diminished to a nagging throb, and life began to take on a more pleasant glow.
That's when I turned on the PBS show Frontier House, in which three American families spend nearly half a year acting like pioneers in 1883 Montana. It was good soap opera stuff, with the various families feuding with each other, feeling sorry for themselves and struggling to survive without their cushy 21st century lifestyles.
Like many others, I suspect, the show resonated deeply with me. Several things struck me. First, except for the wise older father (who left early), almost every adult was (surprise!) an insufferable, petty, self-absorbed, jealous jerk, … a telling statement about our time. Second, hard as it was, life for them during those four months was simple, coherent and purposeful — exactly what most of us are looking for today.
And finally, the ending of the series, showing the families after they had returned to modern life, was unbearably depressing. They looked lost, sad and bored — kind of like most of the people you see in the cars around you each morning — as if their world had been suddenly drained of all energy and color.
A Deadly Pioneer Past
Now the tendonitis in my left knee started to ache. At 1 a.m., lying in bed, I was still wide awake. I knew I wouldn't be able to get to sleep until I put all the events of the day together.
Was the world, or at least our civilization, really ending? Both the evening news and Frontier House seemed to confirm everything that Lukacs had written.
But then I reminded myself of the book I've just written, the rough draft still sitting on my desk. It describes my own ancestors' life on the Kansas prairie, the Oregon coast and in the Cherokee Strip. It's not a pretty story.
During a blizzard in Kansas, a family of 14 huddled together under a pile of blankets to keep from freezing — only to discover in the morning they'd suffocated the baby. My own grandmother spent the first four years of her life living in a cave dug out of a creek bank. And I have good evidence that her grandmother colluded with the hired hand to murder her husband, my great-great-grandfather.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but at least compared to the ancestors in my family tree, civilization seems to be on the rise.
Change at an Unprecedented Pace
But what about those "frontier" families that looked so bewildered and sad after returning to the modern world? Here, I think Lukacs and the rest of the twilight-of-the-West crowd fail, ironically, because they don't take a big enough view.
Life may seem crazier, less focused and more dislocating now than in, say, 1883 Montana. But that is largely because, thanks to the technology revolution, we are currently in the midst of a period of unprecedented change. This change is occurring so fast that we haven't time to assimilate one revolution before the next one arrives.
We may indeed be a unique generation — not because civilization is going to end on our watch, but because we won't be around to enjoy the benefits of all of this change. In fact, this may be our great sacrifice to mankind, the way WWII was to our parents and pioneering the West was to their grandparents.
If that is true, then this is not an era of decline, but of a painful and confusing renewal. And that pain and confusion shows up in our ugly art and our messy lives. But one thing it doesn't suggest is the end of a cycle of history. Instead it argues for moving forward, for driving technology onwards, and for regaining our very American belief in Progress. And a little more beauty would help too.
Having realized this, the pain in my elbow and knee has disappeared. Of course, the world at 1 a.m. is always young and full of promise. Let's see how I feel in the morning. …
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” is editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised. For more, go to Forbes.com. And you can talk back to Silicon Insider via e-mail.